Back in the summer I posted a light-hearted series of
articles inspired by Susan’s and my many happy days in the African bush during
the long part of our lives we lived in South Africa. The series is not yet complete……
With apologies to my good friends, the vendors and some
consultants in the e-learning industry!
They look like something from the dinosaur era. They are largely solitary or at most
associating in small family groups. They
have only the elephant as a natural enemy.
Their horn is erroneously highly valued as an aphrodisiac, which means
they are highly prized and sought after by hunters. Saner mortals get
incredibly excited when they see one. The black rhino is dangerous because it
is short-sighted – easily provoked and
very aggressive. Its white cousin is bigger, more benign, but just as capable
of causing incredible mayhem and damage. They are thick-skinned. And in species survival terms, they are
successful.
I am not an expert, but I have sat for many hours watching
them. What do I recall?
·
They certainly don’t normally do it –
communities that is for they mostly walk alone
·
They aren’t a peer species – a strict hierarchy
is evident on those few occasions where groups are together. And there is little
that is more awe-inspiring than to see an adult bull rhino on the charge after
a cow who has in some way broken the rules
·
They are fiercely territorial – and will kill
intruders of their own rare species to defend territory
·
Their learning is very directed, with mothers
taking great, protective care to teach and shield their babies
·
The learning curve is long – the young stay with
their mothers for years before venturing away on their own
·
They do things the same way they have for all
those millions of years – at least that is what it appears on the outside
·
They don’t seem to take much notice of what is
happening around them – why should they?
They survive well and, poachers apart, have few threats to their
well-being
·
They have for millions of years been on an
evolutionary route to nowhere – but somehow they survive – perhaps because of
their great size
·
In the face of poaching, the conservators who
love them have gathered round to protect them and ensure their survival –
driven on by fear of the potential horror of a world without them
So why did I mention my friends, the vendors and some
consultants in e-learning?
In a world in which change is happening fast – as it is in
the battle for survival that all wild-life has– I see many vendors exhibiting
some rhino-like characteristics.
The basic need to survive in business seems for many to
obscure the fact that the world around them is changing – and moving away from what
was once their security.
No longer does the world at large want courses whether
online, or face to face, bespoke or generic as it is increasingly influenced by
the social media driven shift towards individuality, self-learning,
experiential discovery and a regaining of the power of conversation in
community. But many are still rushing
headlong down the rapids to find ever quicker ways of cooking up a new dish to
satisfy eager managerial mouths seduced into thinking that “training will fix
the problem”.
Gone are the days of command and control when L&D could
dictate a syllabus or curriculum to line, aided by weak senior authorisation
that failed to see the hazards of the “mandatory” training intervention. Business leaders now look at the
value add and the costs of L&D – and the evidence of their conclusions is
clear in the declining budgets that are repeatedly and depressingly reported.
Business is too fast and too focused now on changing to survive
to have time for obsessive recording and measuring of everything that moves and
changes, so the LMS is waning. But many
of its suppliers cling on – adding clever desktops and other functionality (that
rightfully belong with the IT department and with business processes) – in a
bid to extend their existence.
Hierarchical and autocratic control is challenged everywhere
in our lives, at work, at home and in the wider national and world environments
in which we live. Networked, information
driven, collaborative and at the same time individual, we have moved as a
global society that does not want prescription, one size fits all solutions, or
above all being told what is good for it in the way people learn as they live
and work. The world has become a global
social learning environment in which informality, mutuality and collaboration
are the energising concepts.
The vendor community (with its consultants) is rightly admired and respected by
its clients for its past assistance and current ability to create ever more
clever products. Why then does it seem
to try now to hold back the tsunami of change to an informal, collaborative,
networked, more individually directed culture that is sweeping through our
world, fuelled by the very tools and platforms that built the industry? To hear of a vendor telling a client that “it
is too soon to engage in social learning, we will help you with that transition
over a 5 year period” is about as savvie as Canute sitting on the seashore and
daring the waves to come in!
The hi-jacking and distortion of words and concepts – and
their reinterpretation in forms developed out of an inward self-preservation
interest – performs no service of trust to those clients for whom the vendors
vie so territorially and aggressively.
Trying to stifle insight about the implications of global sociological
shift and to shield clients on whom the industry depend from understanding the
change is a kind of censorship and misinformation that in our modern
investigative society will soon be seen to be hollow. It will be swept away like the debris of
those terrible waves. There needs to be an understanding that it is not just from
the viewpoint of L&D that the SoMe tsunami can be seen – other business
functions are also aware of it!
Just as the in-company L&D professional has to recognise
the giant wave of the communication revolution, and to work with the line to
interpret it and help employees use it to business advantage, so too the vendor
industry and its consultants have a duty to do the same for the hand that feeds
them. Those that do will survive. Those that look inward and persist in
building self-preservation strategies will surely go the way of all businesses
that fail to understand and adapt to their changing environment.
The rhino survives, just, but plods its own singular path
seemingly oblivious to what is happening around it. Our modern world and the world of learning is
one that calls for rapid adaptation, change and collaboration. It is one in which survival for client and
vendor alike will depend on facing the facts of the changing landscape honestly
and collaboratively.
We must all work together to ensure we discharge our common
duty – to help every individual to learn to the best of their ability and to
fulfil their life potential.
